Thursday, April 18, 2013

It's a Pizza Party..with a side of cookies!!

We've been studying half in math lately.

Years ago I decided to start a tradition of having the kids make pizzas.

They get to make a pizza all on their own. They choose their own toppings and design the pizza anyway they would like it. Then overnight, I bake it and the next day they are ready to begin. And did I mention these are fake pizzas? It doesn't matter, the kids love pizza--real or fake!

Most of my lesson about half is about sharing food with their friends. We talk about how it's nice to share and how we need to be fair when we cut things in half to share with our friends. We talk about different types of foods that they can share with their friends like pizza, candy bars, cookies and the list goes on and on. The kids love this part because they get to think of all their yummy foods that they like to eat with their friends. It makes everyone hungry!!

We then pretend to have a pizza party. The kids have to cut out all of their ingredients.

(I just traced a big circle for the crust, little circles on red for pepperonis, little rectangles for green and yellow peppers, tan rectangles for cheese and I freehand make mushrooms on white.)

The students make their pizza.

They turn it over and with a ruler they draw straight-line down the back and we check to make sure they have divided it evenly in half. Once I've checked that both sides are relatively even, I allow them to cut on the straight line dividing a pizza and half.

Take a look at how cute their pizzas turned out!

We then did the same thing with cookies.

The kids cut out and decorated their own chocolate chip and sugar cookies.

After they cut them in half evenly, they glued them onto a sheet of paper. They then had to tell how they cut it, which was in half, and write who they would share the other half of their cookie with.